


Your Ears Only

by SylvanWitch



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Attempted Sexual Assault, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, missing stair, non-graphic reference to past attempted sexual assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:36:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21707590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Steve has a story he's not allowed to tell, but he tells it anyway.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 16
Kudos: 170





	Your Ears Only

**Author's Note:**

> I was thinking about SERE training and Steve's dedication to service and what happens when a person in a position of power is a predator, and this story happened. There is no graphic description of the attempted assault, but there may be triggering content herein. Please be kind to yourself and don't read it if it's going to hurt you.

“What?” Steve is saying into the phone as he comes backward through the door, using his ass and hip to bump it open.

“What, what?” Danny answers from the kitchen, trying to be funny.

Steve ignores him. Doesn’t throw him a frown or give him an exaggerated eye-roll or shoot him the bird. 

He ignores him.

Danny can’t parse from Steve’s expression what’s going on on the other end of the phone line, but he feels his stomach flip nervously as he turns back to the pancakes on the stovetop.

Steve, for his part, has set down the package he was carrying that had necessitated the hands-less door-opening trick, and wandered out to the lanai, where Danny catches only the occasional syllable in what sounds like Steve’s strident tone, the one he uses when he’s a half-minute away from losing his shit all over some foolishly sneering suspect.

The pancakes are steaming on the plates when Steve comes back through to the kitchen, slides onto a stool, and picks up his fork. He doesn’t look at Danny, doesn’t say a word, just pours a little coconut syrup over them and gets to work.

He eats like it’s a chore, chewing mechanically, eyes fixed somewhere else, seeing things Danny can’t. Steve only gets this closed off when the news is about his old life, and he’s made it part of his mission statement to never talk about that life with Danny if he can avoid it.

Steve says he doesn’t want to drag his old messes into their new life together.

Danny thinks Steve is afraid of what Danny might discover.

Which is stupid. Danny loves Steve—sometimes to the point of distraction, like ridiculous, head-over-heels, drive-the-car-off-a-pier-onto-a-freighter kind of love.

He can’t imagine anything Steve might have done that he, Danny, isn’t prepared to forgive.

“You going to be Broody McBrooderson all morning, or are you going to tell me my pancakes are awesome?” Danny asks at last, going with what’s always worked for them—snark mixed with genuine, if masked, affection.

At that, Steve looks up. There’s a tic under his left eye and a certain tightness at the corner of his mouth, and Danny feels his stomach do another somersault.

“Babe?” he asks, dropping any pretense of breezy unconcern.

Steve shakes his head. “It’s nothing.”

Danny suppresses a mighty urge to throw a banana slice at him. He sets his fork down just in case his willpower slips.

“That’s not nothing face,” Danny presses, holding his breath. 

Sometimes, Steve likes being pushed—up against the wall in the hallway, under that black-and-white photo of an aircraft carrier named after some dead president; in the shower, when Danny’s got plans to get him dirty; around the smart table, when Steve’s theory about a case needs challenging; on the grass during their ‘friendly’ flag football games (where it’s not technically legal for Danny to touch Steve at all and where Steve noticed for the first time that Danny’s handsiness with him was different than it was with the others).

And sometimes, Steve reacts by shutting down, face going as unreadable as a redacted top secret file.

This time, Steve sets his fork down carefully beside his unfinished stack, slides off the stool, rounds the table in two strides, and grabs Danny by the biceps, lifting him almost bodily from his own stool so that he can cover Danny’s mouth with his own, force his tongue between Danny’s lips, and silence him.

It’s effective, but Danny sees a flaw in Steve’s strategy, which he exploits as soon as Steve lets him up for air.

“Don’t try to distract me with your sex god routine,” Danny says, earning himself another breath-stealing kiss.

This time, when Steve pulls away, Danny makes a show of locking his mouth and throwing away the key.

Steve does roll his eyes at that, which makes Danny think there’s hope for him after all.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Danny,” Steve says, his voice a little wrecked by the tonsil hockey. It makes Danny feel smug, which he doesn’t even try to hide.

Steve huffs out a little breath of a laugh and then brings a hand up to rub the nape of his neck, like he’s got a headache coming on.

“But I don’t want it between us at this table or in this house, either,” Steve goes on, and Danny wonders if the sky is growing dark because there’s a morning shower moving in or if the first seal has been broken and the earth is about to be plunged into chaos and a plague of Horsemen.

“You know there are things I can’t tell you.”

Danny nods, making a rolling “yeah, yeah” gesture with his hand.

“This is one of them. Which is why I’m absolutely not telling you right now that one of the guys I trained under in SERE school has been brought up on charges of sexual misconduct, and I might have to take a few days off to testify.”

“You didn’t hear that I might’ve had a run-in with this guy myself, and I certainly didn’t say anything to you about the time I decked him to keep him off of me during psyops training, which almost got me kicked off the team.”

Steve takes a shaky breath. “Also, you never heard me talk about how I was assured at the time that he’d be taken care of, which was obviously a lie.”

Danny’s stomach has gone cold, and he only realizes he’s clenched his hands into fists when he feels little half-moons of pain on his palms. He takes a breath, letting it out slowly, and clears his throat so his answer comes out without a shake in it.

He knows Steve, knows him better than he knows anyone else. The worst thing in this case for Steve isn’t that some guy abused his rank to take advantage of a junior officer. It’s not even that the guy touched Steve in a way that made him uncomfortable. It’s that the Navy he bled and would have died for let him down by protecting Steve’s abuser, that the guy went on to hurt other young men the same way he tried to do to Steve.

“It’s not your fault,” Danny blurts, and Steve nods unhappily. “I know that, Danny.”

“No, I mean, it’s not your fault they didn’t get rid of the guy like they said they had. It’s not on you, Steve. You did the right thing. You told the truth. They’re the ones who fucked up.”

Danny reaches for Steve, threads their fingers together, holds on.

A few moments pass during which Steve’s face goes soft and vulnerable in a way that makes it physically hurt for Danny to take a breath.

At last, Steve nods again, a tight little smile on his mouth, and pulls away.

Danny lets him go, lets him sit back down, pick up his fork and pretend to eat.

Danny resumes his seat but doesn’t bother acting like he’s going to finish his breakfast.

“Can I—?” he starts, unsure where he was going with that.

“Do you—?” he tries, also unsuccessfully.

“It’s okay, Danny,” Steve says, offering Danny an out. “We don’t have to talk about it. In fact, we didn’t. We haven’t.”

Danny brushes off Steve’s reminder about secrecy with an impatient gesture. “But we should,” Danny insists, not comfortable with letting Steve wall up inside of himself this awful thing that happened to him.

Steve shrugs, fiddles with his fork. “It’s not like he—. I mean, I stopped him before it went anywhere.”

“It’s still assault,” Danny insists, and by Steve’s tight, unhappy expression, he knows Steve knows that too.

“Can I help?” Danny asks at last, feeling completely help _less_.

Steve looks up at him then, making eye contact, and Danny holds his breath. “You help me every day, Danno,” Steve says. There’s a slight redness along Steve’s lower lid and a gleam in his eyes that can’t be mistaken.

“I love you,” Danny says, as if that explains everything.

Judging by the speed with which Steve leaves his seat and is once again at Danny’s side hauling him up into a long, wet, deep kiss, Danny guesses it does.


End file.
